Earlier this week, Texas Instruments introduced their latest IP phone development platform that's designed to allow IP phone manufacturers to create solutions that will offer a truly feature rich experience to end users.

I was fortunate to meet TI's Kim Devlin-Allen who heads up the company's business development efforts for CPE VoIP Communications Infrastructure and Voice DSP Systems to discuss the latest news.

Devlin-Allen told me that the latest offering from TI - the TNETV107x family -- is designed to allow developers to build solutions to serve the full range of clients, from entry level IP desk sets to fully featured executive IP phones. She explained that the new platform will include the TMS320C64x series digital signal processors and will allow developers to leverage a wide range of TI's silicon and software solutions to create their IP devices.

Developers can also take advantage of TI's OMAP technology for ultra low power and amazing graphics capabilities to give their customers more options.

One of the things driving developers to design more fully featured phones is the fact that a younger generation of employees entering the workforce are demanding all the bells and whistles of unified communications and a platform that would allow them to access all the features and applications they need to be more productive.

The chips will be available in the first half of next year.

Texas Instruments also announced a new customer that is leveraging TI's TNETV1055 platform to develop a high-definition voice IP phone. TI announced the Yealink Network Technology has designed the SIP-T28 to support the wideband codec G.722.

The phone is described as a "stylish 6-line IP phone featuring 16 programmable function keys, four soft keys, an XML screen, SMS language customization and 'groupable' enterprise phone books, among other features."